Catching Up

Sunday may become our new regularly scheduled blog day. I prefer to spend Sunday knitting and take pictures at the end of the day, since I usually make pretty good progress on Sundays, but I'll just have to make do.

I've been working on my Buttonwillow but progress has been slower than it could be, because it's getting cold here, so I keep reaching for my big squishy Umaro blanket.



As I laid Buttonwillow out to take its picture, I realized something disturbing.



There is a very distinct color line where I changed skeins. Now, I've been very fortunate with this kind of thing in the past, so I guess it was inevitable that I would have this issue eventually. But I'm feeling a little grumpy about it. I didn't alternate rows, obviously, but I didn't really think it would be an issue. I'm not ripping it out. my buttonwillow will just have to be striped.

Sigh.

I also finally got some long overdue blocking done. This prayer shawl has been laying around my house for ages waiting for me to get around to blocking it, and at last, I have done so.







This yarn is a wool/microfiber blend. I'm not even sure what it is now - I know I got it from LittleKnits but--time for a rav check. Please hold.

...

Okay, it's Rowan Cashsoft Aran, and the pattern is "Prayers of Love" by Carla Willingham.

Anyway, so instead of soaking and pinning, I put it in the washer on my 'hand wash' cycle, and then took it, still damp, and ran wires through the edges and pinned it out. Then I took a towel and my iron and, keeping the towel between the shawl and the iron, and without putting my iron down even on the towel, I puffed steam all over it and steamed it really well, until it was damp(er). Then I left it until it was dry, at which time I unpinned it and took it to my prayer shawl group to turn in, immensely pleased with myself for having finally gotten off my butt to do it.

I also blocked my Kleio, since the person for whom it was a gift was in town this weekend. I gave it to her on the condition that she modelled it for me, so here she is!



With a Romi pin:



I adore the edging on this piece, it really just makes the look.







Love, love, love. Again, this is Kleio from Romi in Sunshine Yarns Classic Sock, and the whiter colorway is "Luna," and the more colorful one is "Dobby." Appropriate, as my friend is a big Harry Potter fan!

We've been best friends since middle school and Kleio, the muse of history, is just so perfect for her, and the colors are so exactly her colors, that I really couldn't be happier with this project. She loved it, too, which really made my day.

Now, if you'll excuse me, dear readers, it's very chilly today, and I feel the need to knit a large squishy wool blanket!

Gasp! A real blog entry! With real pictures!

Again, desperately sorry for the hiatus, folks. I'm going to have to work out a new blog schedule with my new job. The hours are a little different from what I'm used to and I have plenty to fill my time, so no down time to blog in.

On with the WIP report! Here's what I've been up to:

1. Umaro
It got cold outside and I went running for this blanket. It's so squishy and it will be so warm, I'm looking forward to wrapping up in it. I've got almost three repeats done out of seven, so I still have a long way to go, but it's coming along nicely.







2. Galadriel's Mirror
I picked this one up for a little while, but it kind of got sidelined when my life became a swirling vortex of chaos. I just didn't (and really still don't) have the mental energy for it just at the moment, but I did make some progress.





3. Buttonwillow
Of course I have to have a Romi on my needles, and this is her newest design, Buttonwillow, released today for Ravelry purchase. This design debuted at Vogue Knitting Live and then was available as a kit only. I got the kit so I've been working on this one for a few days already. Road to China light is gorgeous and oh so soft, very nice to have in your hands. Mine is in the Grey Pearl colorway. This is really a good knit for me right now, it's pretty simple and it just feels nice.





So that's it for the works in progress, other than a sock I've been working on in Neighborhood Fiber Company Capital Luxury Sock. When I did my stash organization I found that I had bought a whole bunch of this yarn in different colors, but had never actually knit with it! I decided it was time to fix that, picked out one, wound it up, and it's my mindless, carry-around knitting.

Many of my finished objects are languishing waiting to be blocked. Kleio is in that pile, sadly.





Lovely, finished, and unblocked. I've got some new blocking wires on the way, though, so I'm waiting for those to come in before I worry too much about this one. I do have a lot of ends to weave in on this one before it can be blocked anyway.

I did, however, finally block my Katanya (also by Romi):









So there you have it, and hopefully I will return in a more timely fashion next week!

Still Alive!!!

Deepest apologies, my much beloved blogees, for my extended absence! I hope to be back to blogging shortly, but there has been a lot of upheaval chez Ninja of late. Here's a brief synopsis:

--I finished Kleio
--I got a new job
--My brother also got a new job in another state, which means he is moving out of my basement in rather short order
--We took a quick beach vacation between the end of the old job and the start of my new one AND...CodeNinja and I are engaged! We're hoping to be married in the spring, and there is soooo much to do!

With all of that going on, I just haven't managed much knitting, and I haven't blocked Katanya or Kleio. I have done some work on my Umaro blanket and some on Galadriel's Mirror, plus I started a boring plain vanilla pair of socks, as that's all I seem to have the brain power for. I have not knit in four days, that's how crazy it's been. I finally broke that unfortunate streak this evening thanks to the boring socks.

Of course the second (or third) question every knitter asks is, what, if anything, I'm going to knit for my wedding. The answer is - I have NO idea!! I don't even feel like I can decide that until I get a dress. I don't know that there is time or that I want to put myself through the stress of knitting anything. When I announced my engagement on the Romi Rav board I had tons of support and several offers for help if I did want a knitted item for the wedding. It was very sweet and I'm honored by all the attention. I'm just totally unequipped to decide at the moment. Part of me wants to do something crazy and knit a Princess Shawl or something of the kind in cobweb yarn to wear, perhaps as a veil. But, I don't know. Again, it depends on the dress. If I have something with a lovely back I might not want to cover it. If I have something with a simpler back then the shawl might jazz it up a little.

Also, I'm afraid CraftMama is not terribly knit-friendly and while I am sure if I wanted to wear a shawl she would not say anything, but I fear the Eyeroll of Doom. I know, it's my wedding and I should wear my knitting if I want to, and if I decide I want to, I will. I just don't know what to do yet. Obviously, if I decide to knit something myself I need to decide pretty soon to make sure I have enough time to actually knit it - although I feel like I am reasonably speedy at this point in my knitting career.

So, in light of all this, I hope you will forgive me for my radio silence. I hope to have pictures of knitting to show in the near future, as soon as I can face up to all the pins I will have to use to block either Kleio or Katanya. Blocking both at the same time is not really feasible - there is no way I have enough pins for that!

iPhone Fabulous

It's been a busy and rather tiring few days (how does that happen on a holiday weekend? how?) so I was lazy and I have nothing but iPhone pics for the blog today. I don't even have the fancy iPhone, I have a 3. Not a 3gs, mind you. A plain old cheapy iPhone 3. Suffice it to say, the camera is merely adequate at best. Nevertheless! It will have to do.

I celebrated the holiday by laboring (get it?) on my Katanya shawl in utter determination to get it finished. There is this problem with shawls knit from the neck down, that by the time you are nearing the end, each row seems to take an eternity. I find this very discouraging when I'm knitting on weeknights and can't get through more than a row or two a night because it takes an hour or more to do a given row, so I generally counteract this frustration by working like a fiend on the weekends to get some visible progress. In this case, I was close enough to the end of this shawl that I had some hope that I could finish it over the weekend, saving myself from the tear-inducing weekday slog.

The bind-off for this shawl is supremely clever but also interminable and rather time consuming, so I was hoping if I got all the charts done by Sunday, I could do the bind-off on Monday. When that didn't happen, when I went into Monday with two rows of the chart to go (one very fiddly pattern row and then the endless WS purl row back), I thought, it's not going to happen. There's no way I'm going to get through these AND the bind-off. Especially since SOMEONE invited me to go to the yarn store and I lost knitting time to fondling some Neighborhood Fiber Company fingering weight silk that was to DIE for. The colors shone so brightly they practically glowed in the dark, and the yarn was so SOFT. Some of that WILL be mine someday. But I digress.

Anyway, I knit on the way to the yarn store (I wasn't driving, don't worry) and I knit on the way back from the yarn store, and then I ran inside and threw some laundry in the washer and sat down to knit some more. I knit and I knit and I knit and then I started binding off and I thought, I will NEVER get this done. Especially because I had some issues with the bind off at first. I don't do well with counting bind-off stitches, and counting was more or less required, so I kept getting confused and ripping back because I just had no idea where I was. Then I gave up on counting, figured out how I thought the pattern was supposed to line up (Romi is so darn clever it hurts) and just did that. I really didn't think I would finish. I thought I was going to have to quit before I even got to the halfway mark, but finally, finally, I hit a rhythm and got going and suddenly it was 10 p.m. and I looked at what I had left, and I was so close that I could not, simply COULD NOT, stop knitting. So I kept going and finished the bind-off at 11 p.m. (not as dramatic as finishing at 3 a.m., but I'm just as happy that way). And so, my Katanya is done. Sadly, since I finished it so late, I have only this pitiful little iphone pic of the crinkly, unblocked shawl to show you:



Expect something more spectacular next week. But do you see the edging on the shawl? So darn clever, I'm telling you, I can't stand it.

I did do one other thing this weekend, and that was, start my Kleio, and while I haven't gotten very far, I present to you here, the evidence of my infant Kleio:



I have been watching the Ravelry knitalong with a certain amount of envy for everyone that is so far ahead of me, but I had just hit that critical mass point on Katanya where I was so close to being done that I couldn't put it down. But now I am looking forward to some sweet, sweet garter stitch - at least until I get to the braids that separate the garter from the lace section. Should be interesting.

Oh, and here's at least a little proof that I did all that frogging I said I was going to do, although I forgot all about it the day I blogged and vowed to go home and do it that night. But, still! Frogging was done!



Frogging that hat specifically was a little difficult, I have to admit. It seemed a waste of all the work that went into it, but really, I hated working on the darn thing, the yarn clung to the needles like it had claws - I even had trouble getting the needle out of the darn thing so I could frog it! I didn't even particularly like the colors together. It would have made ABSOLUTELY no sense to keep it since I'm sure I would never have finished it. Frogging got easier the further I went, though, and the less it looked like a hat and the more it looked like a pot holder. After that, the frogging was easier. I was positively gleeful while I frogged the chocolate waffle scarf. I did get a little stuck on the KSH shawl. Mohair has a reputation for being really difficult to frog, and the reputation is well deserved. I gave up on it in frustration after a while, frogged everything else, and just sort of shoved that shawl on the corner of the couch to deal with later. Much later. But, as I was frogging it I did see more mistakes than I had originally thought existed in the shawl, so I feel much better about my frogging decision in that situation.

WIPs and UFOs

Remember this picture?



Up until I did this stash organization, I would have told people rather proudly that I don't have a lot of WIPs and almost no UFO's. Everything in this pile I intended to finish 'someday.' I love that magical setting on Ravelry where you can say a project is 'hibernating.' That means I don't have to admit that I'm not going to finish it AND it doesn't count as a WIP. It's just...hibernating. Waiting for the warmth and daylight of that moment when I bless it with my attention once more, take it in hand, and finish it right off.

Well. Nothing like a little organization to increase your self-awareness. So, with no more self-deception...let's take a look, in no particular order.

1. Featherweight Cardigan, in KnitPicks Shimmer hand dyed lace. Started June 8, 2009



This one is just missing the sleeves. This was a fun knit for a while, although the miles and miles of endless stockinette did get to one eventually. There's always a place for mindless carry-around knitting, though, and this one qualified easily, so it got a lot of work as I trekked around to various things, and because it was laceweight it was easy to carry. I even got the stitches picked up for the collar and knit that out. As designed, the bottom band and collar of this cardigan are supposed to roll, but I don't like rolling, so I put a ribbed bottom band and collar on them. And then...I quit at the sleeves. Pathetic, right? Why did I fall out of love with this project at the sleeves?

I'm pretty sure what happened was that I put it on, and it didn't live up to my expectations. I'm not sure that's the cardigan's fault. It hasn't been blocked, so it looks lumpy and uneven, and the yarn is an alpaca silk blend, so it's all drape and no body, and I just...wasn't excited about it. So I stuffed it in a bag with the intention of finishing it..."someday."

Now, here's my dilemma. I don't love it, but that's a lot of knitting done and only a little knitting left to go, and there's nothing really WRONG with it (aside from one stitch that's a little wonky in the body, where I think I knit into the stitch below by accident). I don't know what to do. I don't feel any motivation to work on it, but it feels absolutely stupid to toss it this far in. A weekend would probably finish it off, and then I could block it and try it on and decide whether it was going to get any wear or not.

2. Umaro Blanket in Cascade Lana Grande, started Jan 29, 2011.



This one is a simple story. I started it, but I am so used to working with small needles that fumbling with giant needles and heavy yarn is just alien feeling to me, so progress was slow. If I worked on it too long, my hands hurt. I kept this one by my bed and worked a few rows before bed every night.

Then it got hot. End of story. It's been sitting in the basket by my bed for ages. It's hard to get the motivation to work on a bulky blanket when it's hot outside. I have confidence I will pick up speed on this one when the weather turns again.

3. Mystery Stole in Jaggerspun Zephyr, started...um...a long time ago. I didn't note it on my project page.



This stole is knit in two pieces and then grafted in the middle. I knit the entire first half, and then stalled on the second half. I got a little frustrated with all the beading in the first half, especially because I didn't like the way the designer had instructed to place the beads. The instructions were to knit the stitch and then place the bead on it, rather than placing and then knitting as I am accustomed to, and I felt like little holes were forming around the beads, so I decided just to bead the stitch on the wrong side row, so that the bead sat where it was supposed to but without the little holes.

This is really quite an old project, probably only the second or third big lace project I attempted, and I'm a lot more experienced at both lace and beading now. I'm pretty sure I could whip through this thing and finish it off no problem. I'm worried about the grafting, though. The only thing I've ever grafted is sock toes and I do those as tightly as I possibly can. The idea of having to graft lace and maintaining tension in such a way as the seam didn't show makes me cower in fear. I know I'll be upset if I can't make it look right. Still, that seems like a stupid reason not to finish. I don't want to rip this one; even though the design itself is not my favorite ever, the color is pretty and, again, it's mostly done. This honestly might have been finished before now if I could have FOUND it any of the times I got the urge to finish it.

4. Witterings Hat in KnitPicks Crayon, started July 2007.



Another very, very early project, one I took on before I learned that I hate knitting with cotton, especially at a tight gauge. It wouldn't be that hard to finish, but...I don't want to. I know there are mistakes in this project, I don't really love the colors, I HATED the yarn (I don't even think they make it anymore) - I really should probably just frog it.

5. Karen's Water Turtles Shawl started April 7 2009



This one is actually already marked as frogged on my Ravelry page, I just haven't actually done it yet. I don't think the marriage of pattern and yarn was really right for this one, the Jojoland Melody just didn't look right in it. I think I wanted something with more drape, and this was just too bouncy. The yarn is nice, though, I think it'll make a great shawl and I have four balls of it, so I just need to go ahead and frog this one and put the yarn back in the (newly organized) stash.

6. Simone pullover in Elizabeth Lavold baby llama, started sometime this year or last, I can't remember and it's not marked on my Ravelry page.



Another victim of summer. I love the feel of this yarn, I love the look of this cowled sweater, I've divided the sleeves from the body and all it needs is some time to knit down the stockinette section to measurements before starting the openwork panel on the sides. It just got too darn hot. This one will make good football knitting. I don't really like football but CodeNinja does. He is from the DC area. I am from Dallas. I like to mock him, but that really only works if you're paying at least a little attention to the game.

7. Veronique cardigan in Rowan Kidsilk Night, started May 23 2009.



(My camera appears to have eaten the picture of this one, so please accept this picture even though it is terribly out of date)

I was in love with the elegant model picture of this circle cardigan. I knit it happily - right until I sewed up the seams and put the things on, and did not look anything like the model. There's this weird bunching that happens down under the arms and a survey of the Ravelry projects quickly showed me it's not unique to my version. But, again, all it's missing at this point are the sleeves. I could just knit the damn sleeves, block the thing, and then decide whether it's worth wearing or not. I don't know, my gauge may be too tight for this airy circular shrug - I did block the pieces before I sewed them together so I don't know what to think. I may just have to designate a sleeve-knitting weekend to finish off these two cardigans so they can stop PLAGUING MY SOUL.

8. Chocolate Waffle Scarf in KnitPicks Swish Worsted Superwash, started September 2007



(picture also eaten, so this one is not recent - See the WIP pile pic above to see how much is done - this one is front and center)

Speaking of things that plague my soul. Seed stitch and stripes. I think I'd rather slit my wrists than finish this not-even-half-done scarf. Sadly, frogging it won't do much to reclaim the yarn, but I can use it for charity knitting baby hats and stuff. I don't know what I was thinking, but as you can see from the date, this is one of my oldest projects from back when I first started knitting, and my only excuse is - I didn't know any better. No pattern, I was just winging it.

9. Shawl in Patons Soy Stripes started in May 2007



No pattern for this one either, just cast on a bunch of stitches and started knitting this broken garter...rib...thing, because I thought the yarn was pretty. Not really wide enough to be a shawl, not narrow enough to be a scarf, and I kept running out of yarn. I think I'll frog this one and see if CodeNinja's mom (hereafter referred to as CodeMama) wants the yarn. If she doesn't want it, maybe somebody at my charity knitting group will.

10. Beginner's Lace Triangle in Fleece Artist Suri Blue, started December 2007



This was supposed to be my first lace project. I figured out, after working a chunk of the first side, that I was doing my YO's totally wrong, which is why the lace looks so closed on the bottom half of this photo and then suddenly opens up at the top.

Instructions for this shawl are to knit the increase chart until you are halfway out of yarn or bored stupid, and then start the decrease chart. Over the course of a couple of Christmas trips home I did manage to use up the first skein of yarn and start the decrease chart, but this has long been abandonned for other things. It was a good shawl that served its purpose, I learned a lot while working on it, but I don't really see myself coming back to this one any time soon. The cable caps actually came off it at one point and a bunch of stitches are dropped and would need to be laddered back and fixed - or I'd have to rip back and then put a billion stitches back on the needles. No thanks - this is good yarn, and I'll find another project for it.

11. Moonlight Sonata in Rowan Kidsilk Haze, started July 15, 2008



(again, an out of date picture)

This one is also already marked as frogged on my Rav page, but I've never gotten around to doing the actual frogging. I liked this shawl, and I think it's pretty in the yarn, but a) I was bored stupid after the third or fourth repeat b) there's a dropped stitch a repeat or two back c) I dropped it for Christmas knitting. Again, this was a fairly early project and it would probably go a lot more smoothly now that I'm more experienced. Maybe I'll frog it, but start over. It's awfully pretty.

12. Three Scarf Ruana in Valley Yarns Northampton, started May 11 2009

I'm not even going to bother with a photograph here. It's a big long grey scarf. This was intended to be a long-term project, so that I always had a garter stitch something to be working on if we, say, went to the movies or something like that and I needed to grab something. However, it's grown a little unwieldy for that kind of thing, and it's been sitting in a box for ages. I'm not sure - maybe I should just frog it and save the yarn for something else. There is kind of a lot of yarn.

13. Galadriel's Mirror in HandMaiden Silk Twist



This one was a combination of startitis and warm weather. I started it even though I had a billion other things already going on, and it just wasn't the most appealing thing to work on at the time. It's going to be quite large and it's fingering weight, so it wasn't really summer-appropriate knitting. I took this one downstairs and moved it to my active queue immediately, and I've already finished the first chart. It's the perfect project right now with that fall smell that's beginning to come into the air. Right now it's still small enough to work on even though it's warm, and by the time it gets big enough to be uncomfortable, the weather will hopefully have cooled down some. Plus, I really like this pattern. I did my first bobble on Monday night. I don't much care for bobbles, but they're an essential element of this pattern, so bobble I did. Still not a fan, but I'll live with it. The overall shawl is going to be lovely. It's awfully textured, and I worry a bit that the silk twist yarn has too much texture, but having looked at other peoples' beginnings, I think that's just the way it looks at this beginning stage. As it grows, the lines of the pattern will come together to look a little less chaotic, I hope.

And I think that's it. Besides these projects, the only thing I'm really working on is a second sock for CodeNinja (which I haven't actually started yet, since I somehow managed to end up with three needles in my bag, all of different sizes, instead of two of the same size) and Katanya. I finished Chart K last night and have only two charts to go, but Galadriel's Mirror makes a nice break from those superlong rows (for now...there are going to be a lot of stitches on that one before it's done too).

I have to admit I got a little depressed when looking at these unfinished projects. I have a reputation for starting more than I finish in all my craft pursuits, but I've been proud because I rarely do this in knitting. I finish almost everything I start, or so I thought. But then I took a look at my Rav page. 144 projects entered there, of which 17 are marked as hibernating or frogged. So, even though I have accumulated a fair pile of UFO's in the - what? Four years I've been knitting? I still think I can be pretty proud of my unfinished-to-finished ratio.

I vow that tonight I will go home and ACTUALLY frog stuff, rather than just marking it as frogged on Ravelry and then leaving the unfrogged project in a bag in case I change my mind.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

I skipped out on blogging last week because I really had nothing to show. I'm at the point now where the rows on Katanya, the July Pins & Lace shawl, are so long that they take a while to do, and I just didn't have much time last week at all. Between work, things that had to be done at home and just generally being wiped out once it was all finished, I was barely managing a row a night, and some nights I didn't knit at all. But! Thanks to the hurricane, I had a good excuse to do nothing but knit this weekend. I'm not really sure how that works, since the hurricane wasn't inside and so there was nothing to prevent me from doing all the stuff that needed doing inside, but hey, I needed a break, so I spent a lot of time knitting on Saturday and I got through the mesh section of the lace chart:



Two charts to go, I think. There are a lot of charts in this pattern! However, you only do each chart once, so I'm okay with lots of charts.

Friday night, I finished this:



That's right, The Scarf That Would Not Die is finally done. I haven't measured it, but I'm sure it's over six feet. How do I know this?



CodeNinja is 5'10". It'll probably lose some length when blocked as I expect the rib to expand considerably, so it'll be much wider than it is in these pictures. (Please excuse my messy house in the background. I apologize for shattering any illusion you may have had that I am a neat and well-organized person. You may want to take some time to recover before reading the rest of this entry.) I would have blocked it this weekend except that I weep when I think about threading wires through six plus feet of solid knitting.

Sunday, I became possessed. I'm not exactly sure it happened, but I have six pages of flickr photos to prove it's true. We went out to run some errands Sunday after church, and I was telling CodeNinja how I've felt like I'm in a bit of knitting slump lately and I wasn't sure how to get out of it, and maybe I should pull some of my old projects out and see if one of them excited me, and then I sighed heavily because my 'craft room' (otherwise known as 'the vortex of chaos') is in such a state that I was sure I wouldn't be able to find the project I was thinking of even if I tried. Then I said, maybe I should pull it all out and organize the stash.

I say this often. I really do. But this time was different. This time, I went home - and I actually did it.

First I tried to do it a little bit at a time. That was not very successful. Too confusing. So, I pulled all of my yarn out of the craft room and the zillion other nooks and crannies it was occupying in the house, and I piled it all in my guest bedroom.





After this I sorted it roughly by weight, tossing all my sock weight on the left side of the bed, all my lace weight on the right side of the bed, accumulating worsted or heavier in one corner of the room, and tossed all my DK/sport weight into one bag. I enlisted CodeNinja, sat him down with the computer and my Ravelry stash page, and we went through the stash from heaviest to lightest. I pulled stuff out, brought it into the craft room, CodeNinja verified it was in the stash, logged it if it wasn't, let me know if I needed a picture, and then once the yarn was logged and photographed I put it away, as neatly as possible. When I came across a WIP, I put it in the corner, along with all the yarn that was supposed to go with it, to deal with later.

I don't have all that much heavier weight yarn, but the heavier weight yarn was the least well documented, so it took us a while to get through the worsted-or-heavier-pile. The DK pile was even smaller so even though it wasn't all that well documented, it didn't take that long to deal with.

Then came the fingering weight. I sorted it by color first, in rainbow order, with all the neutrals and anything that made me go 'uuhhh...' at the end.







Then I carried it by color group into the craft room, where we verified, photographed if necessary, and I put it away. Though this is by far the most extensive part of my stash, it didn't take that much time to do, because it is also by far the most well-documented area of my stash.

When we finished the sock weight I did the same with the laceweight and now, I present to you...the stash.



The worsted & heavier corner, which I'm afraid, doesn't look all that neat. I need a couple of bins to put this stuff in. The cardboard box has all my Valley Yarns stuff and then everything else is sort of neatly stacked and piled and there IS one little basket in there but it's so buried in yarn you can't see it. But, even though it is somewhat piled, it is organized. All the like yarns are together with their fellows, at least until I need something at the bottom of this pile and start tossing stuff aside with no regard for my previous organizational efforts. It's only a matter of time.

And this, the pride of my stash, the sock & laceweight yarn.



CodeNinja bought these shoe thingies for me some time ago for the express purpose of helping me organize my yarn, and they work pretty well. Of course, as I look at this picture I realize I have made the classic organizational mistake of not allowing adequate room for expansion, but we'll get to that in a moment.

I didn't have quite enough room for everything so some items are hanging next to it using my old system, ziplocks clip ed in skirt hangers. It works when your stash isn't so big, but not so well when it grows as much as mine has.



Then, I turned my attention to my WIP pile.



Some of these items are much loved, and simply unfinished because of unfortunate circumstances or laziness. Some of these are what I like to call, Things I Started Before I Knew Better, and serve as sort of a timeline of stuff I have learned over the last three and a half years of knitting about my own preferences. Unfortunately, some of my photos from this sort seem to be missing, so I'm going to save that for bonus post this week when I can really get into the "WHAT WAS I THINKING??" and maybe that'll make up for having no post last week.

My stash organization hasn't been perfect, even since then I've found more yarn that I didn't deal with during the sort, and there were a few things in my ravelry stash that I know I still have but can't find - but it's a start, and now I can actually walk into the room when I need something, instead of doing this sort of fraught-with-danger hopscotch around the room to try and get to where I think the stuff I'm looking for may be hiding.

One thing this has shown me, as if I really needed evidence, is that I don't really need more yarn. I don't feel like I have an unreasonable amount of stashed yarn, either. It's manageable. But, there aren't a lot of colors that I don't have here. This doesn't really mean I will stop buying yarn, because buying yarn is fun, but I will try to go to the stash first. Also...I really ought to knit more socks. I've got lots of sock yarn now that I feel like is too pretty for socks and that I should save for a shawl, but I really ought to just suck it up and pick some of these skeins out to make socks out of. I'm eyeing some of that Neighborhood Fiber Company Capital Luxury sock for my next pair.